Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.

When the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be their yet.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned

She smiled. I think it's just the snow. I think it makes people stop and think. Bell nodded. I hope it comes a blizzard then.